1. Field of Invention
This invention relates generally to furniture. Specifically, this invention is a structural assembly system that may be utilized to construct a variety of different pieces of furniture. Once a specific furniture piece is formed by the structural assembly system, the system can also be reconfigured to form another different piece of furniture.
2. Related Art
Because they need to be structurally sound as well as aesthetically pleasing, furniture pieces typically include some common characteristics. However, not all of these common characteristics are necessarily beneficial to consumers.
For instance, furniture is ordinarily quite bulky. This bulkiness makes it cumbersome for a person to carry or transport the furniture piece. Bulkiness, in turn, typically means that a large amount of material was used to make the furniture piece which usually means that the furniture piece is quite expensive. Providing a furniture piece which is easy to carry and transport from location to location would thus be beneficial to the prior art. It would also be beneficial to the prior art to provide a furniture piece which is relatively less expensive than other comparable furniture pieces.
Another characteristic of furniture is that fiurniture is normally non-alterable. For instance, a person that purchases a desk will typically not be able to change the configuration or arrangement of the desk, much less turn the desk into a chair (or any other type of furniture piece) if a chair is needed. To address the non-alterability of furniture, manufacturers have lately designed modular furniture pieces or elements. The modules can be inter-changed and/or switched so that the overall configuration or arrangement of the furniture piece can be altered. Moreover, modular furniture pieces usually allow for the expansion of the overall structure through the addition of extra modules. Illustrative of modular furniture pieces are U.S. Pat. No. 5,722,544 issued to Williams on Mar. 3, 1998 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,153,311 issued to Takahashi on May 8, 1979. Both the Williams and the Takahashi Patents provide a modular assembly structure for shelves which can be altered and expanded. However, neither the Williams nor the Takahashi Patent provide a modular assembly that can be altered to become anything other than a shelving structure.
Likewise, U.S. Design Pat. Nos. 259,607 and 266,133, each issued to Stahl, Jr. et al., disclose the end or side module of a chair, with each patent teaching a different type and shape of chair. The inventions taught by the Stahl, Jr. Patents cannot be modified or changed to be anything other than chairs.
Providing a furniture piece which can be altered so that it can be easily transformed into a different furniture piece altogether would be beneficial to the prior art. Such an alterable furniture piece would save consumers money and space and provide efficiency to the furniture industry and to the interior of consumers' homes.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,754,995 issued to Behrendt discloses a Modular Transformable Furniture which may be transformed between a bed, a dresser, storage cabinets, a desk, an entertainment unit, an end table, and display shelving (among others). However, to enable such transformations, the system requires various optional accessory assemblies, depending on the piece of furniture. Thus, providing a transformable piece of furniture which does not require additional various optional accessory assemblies to enable such transformations would be beneficial to the prior art.